After a week of late nights and sleep deprivation, the house is complete! The Show-Me Solar team was the 9th to pass its final inspections last evening, and started a mad dash to beautify the house (we’d never seen so many college students cleaning at once before).

The day wasn’t without difficulties however. After finalizing code and running tests, the automation team encountered several problems. One of the Pico computers crashed, a CF card went bad, the lighting system went down, a few sensors went bad, and without warning, the primary controller that the team had been using for the past year blew out. The team managed to get everything rerouted to the secondary controller and recompiled the code just before the 10:00pm deadline. The broken sensors and parts were replaced just in time as well.

As of late last evening, the team is grid tied on the National Mall. Passing inspections early allowed us to grid tie about 12 hours ahead of schedule, and also earned us a 29 kWh bonus for pre-competition metering.

A few things went haywire after being tied in, but everything seems to be under control now. In an effort to conserve energy, the night team will now be working days and taking advantage of natural light (which they haven’t seen in quite some time).

As things come down to the wire, it looks like the team is in good shape. Maintaining an internet connection remains one of our bigger problems…so stay tuned for another post at a random time when we have one.

We’ve arrived. The team actually made it into Washington DC last week, but we’ve had limited internet access thus far.

After some minor vehicle troubles, our caravan of vehicles arrived on the National Mall. Our house was actually the first to arrive, and we were the first to have our crane up as well. Things are progressing on schedule.

If everything continues to go as planned, we’ll have internet on site in the next few days. At that point, you can expect daily updates and pictures as well.